| PlayerScale | |
| Type: | Subsidiary |
| Industry: | e-commerce, internet advertising, social gaming |
| Foundation: | 2009[1] |
| Location City: | Belmont |
| Location Country: | California |
| Key People: | Jesper Jensen (CEO) John Vifian (COO) Chris Benjaminsen (CPO) Oliver Pedersen (CTO) |
| Products: | Player.IO |
| Num Employees: | 14 (January 2013)[2] |
| Parent: | Yahoo! |
PlayerScale, Inc. is a Belmont-based[2] [3] gaming infrastructure provider.[3] [4] As of 23 May 2013 it operates as a subsidiary of Yahoo!,[1] [3] but it is still functioning as a stand-alone business unit.[5]
PlayerScale's Player.IO is a platform for online games.[3] It works across consoles, the web, PCs, Macs, and on mobile phones.[2] Player.IO is used on a daily basis by an estimated 150 million people worldwide.[6] [3] It works with various programming languages, including C++, Java, .NET, Objective-C, HTML5, Unity, Flash, iOS and Android.[2] The platform includes payment processing, online chat, analytics, virtual currencies, distributed caching, authentication, social login, leaderboards, localization, among other things.[7]
One of the Player.IO showcase projects was the maze-based platform game Everybody Edits.[8] During his lecture at the 2011 Flash Gaming Summit, PlayerScale chief product officer and Player.IO co-founder Benjaminsen revealed that the game, initially published on Flash game portal Newgrounds, had accumulated around 250 thousand registered users in seven months and was making $10,000 monthly.[9]
In a 2011 review for Jay Is Games, John Bardinelli writes: "Experiments in user-created content can go wildly wrong. With Everybody Edits, it happened to go wildly right. [...] The game as a whole doesn't project an air of refined polish, but the core underneath exhibits a lot of creativity and allows players to unleash their imaginations wild on the world in a simple, entertaining sort of way."[10] Phill Cameron of Rock Paper Shotgun: "I keep coming back to Everybody Edits. I think it's because I'm never alone. Just having other people share in your victories, and more importantly, to lessen your defeats, makes for a compelling experience. You're in this together, for better or for worse, and that forces a level of camaraderie. [...] Regardless, you've got one thing in common; you hate whoever created this meticulously designed Rage Machine."[11]
In March 2019, the game suffered a data breach, exposing 871 thousand unique email addresses, alongside usernames and IP addresses.[12] [13] In July 2019, another data breach occurred, leaking 882 unique email addresses, usernames and passwords in plaintext, along with in-game report files.[14] Everybody Edits was eventually shut down on 31 December 2020,[15] the last day Adobe supported its Flash Player.[16]